


I Am a Strange Loop, and Other Drunken Thoughts

by cilceon



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:13:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26713519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cilceon/pseuds/cilceon
Summary: She was in the steeple of the Old North Church, knees brought to her chest, arms wrapped around them to offer some protection from the biting cold. It was early morning, snow was sticking to every surface it could find, blanketing the commonwealth and hiding everything outside of the safety of the box she found herself in. Thankfully, the large blimp that was at the airport across the harbor was included on that list.Wanderer supposed she could have gone to the Castle or Goodneighbor, but it was snowing with a ferocious vigor and it was starting to get dark. She didn't want to get lost. Wanderer once knew theses streets like the back of her hand. Not anymore.She signed and dropped her head into her hands, staring at the floorboards between her feet. They were disgusting and dirty and they made her so very angry. The world is not supposed to look like this.Nothing was supposed to look like this.Everything was grey. There was no color and she was cold. She was cold all the time.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	I Am a Strange Loop, and Other Drunken Thoughts

**Author's Note:**

> this sounds kinda weird but there's this post thread on tumblr that i couldn't get out of my head and decided to take the words from it and put it into a conversation... the thread was written by the three users adventurecore-suggestions, mothdogs, and clementiens.   
> i wanted to give a little drop of who Des is as a person, so i hope y'all like this one...its a lil shorter than i'd like it to be but oh well  
> (the works in this series aren't posted in any particular order!)

She was in the steeple of the Old North Church, knees brought to her chest, arms wrapped around them to offer some protection from the biting cold. It was early morning, snow was sticking to every surface it could find, blanketing the commonwealth and hiding everything outside of the safety of the box she found herself in. Thankfully, the large blimp that was at the airport across the harbor was included on that list.

Wanderer supposed she could have gone to the Castle or Goodneighbor, but it was snowing with a ferocious vigor and it was starting to get dark. She didn't want to get lost. Wanderer once knew theses streets like the back of her hand. Not anymore.

She signed and dropped her head into her hands, staring at the floorboards between her feet. They were disgusting and dirty and they made her so very angry. The world is not supposed to look like this.

Nothing was supposed to look like this.

Everything was grey. There was no color and she was cold. She was cold all the time.

Wanderer picked up the bottle of bourbon nestled between her feet, downing about half of the remaining liquid in one fluid motion. Oh, what Nathan would say to her now. If he knew all the terrible things she had done. She had killed more people in the last six months than he had in any tour in with the army.

Tinker Tom’s words ran through her head; _You are so deadly, Wanderer. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were a courser._

She took another swig of the bottle. What if she's not really her? It wouldn't have been that hard to take the actual Charlotte Maria Hale. Take her memories… Cosworth wouldn't know any better. The pre-war ghouls she’d been reunited with wouldn’t either.

She wouldn't know any better.

Wanderer looked at the bottle now thinking about throwing it through one of the windows, but hesitated. Not wanting to waste the precious alcohol within the glass. She settled for taking another drink instead.

She thought her hiding spot was a safe place. As safe as it could get all the way up here. If it wasn’t for the snow, she would’ve been able to see the stars peeking through the holes in the roof. What roof didn’t have holes in it nowadays.

She rolled her eyes drinking more of the bourbon. Glory said synths can't get drunk. But Wanderer can, or at least her head was telling her so.

She felt so angry and confused and upset she wanted to crawl into her bed and fall asleep and never wake up but she knew that wasn’t an option. Instead she drank more of the liquor. She had to find a way into the Institute, find this Vergil son of a bitch. She needed to find her boy. It wasn’t like she had a bed anyways.

But the highest point of the church was safe, she supposed that not even Dogmeat could find her.

She ran her hands through her hair now. Wrestled it from the bun that was always in the back of her head, letting it cascade down her shoulders to her lower waist. Her dear husband always liked her long hair, ever since they themselves were children.

The first time he had talked to her was after some kids made fun of her on the playground. She was crying by a tree and Nate had sat next to her, _I think your hairs really pretty, those guys are just jealous they can’t look as cool as you._

The memory always stopped her from hacking it off, always having it up instead. But in this moment, she mulled over cutting once more. Having it short to rival Glory. Everyday there was more grey hair and less black. Would he still think it beautiful?

The top of the church was safe, no one would find her where her here. She thought to herself again, willing the words to be true.

Wanderer exhaled, the breath shaking and visible within the cold. She drank the rest of the bottle, setting it down with a _clank_ to her side.

She could feel the dampness in the wall on her shoulder blades, the chill it brought with it was seeping into her flannel. Wanderer hated the cold, so why was she sitting up here? She was so angry, hadn’t felt this rage in such a long, long time. Wanderer hated it. She hated the person that she had become. The monster that she was. There was nothing she could do about it. Nathan would be disgusted with her.

She looks to the bottle again. Maybe only a shots worth was left of the liquor. Was it whisky or bourbon? She couldn’t remember. Honestly, she didn’t care anymore. Wanderer gripped the base of her hair, all but pulling it from her scalp and leaned into her knees. Willing herself to cry but knowing that no tears wouldn’t fall, they never fell anymore. Unlike the people she killed.

She thought for a moment that she heard footsteps coming from the stairs below her. Wanderer’s mind, foggy with intoxication, reassured her that it was just the church groaning with its age. She brought the bottle up and emptied the remainder of the contents. Now that it was empty, she lost all grievances of throwing the glass.

She moved her arm all the way back against the wall and flung her wrist forwards sending the bottle careening out of the spire. Wanderer was safe up there. No one was going to be able to find her.

“Wanderer, you almost took my head off.” No one should be able to find her- _except for Deacon_. She rolls her eyes sparing the intruder a glance before returning to the floor between her, then snapping it back up.

She brought her shoulder blades back, body going tense with the realization that it wasn’t, in fact, Deacon who was coming out of the hatch.

Red hair popped up through the floor, a quizzical look on the woman’s face.

“Desdemona! I am so sorry.” Wanderer felt like she just landed herself in the dean's office, an odd thought since she was nearly thirty.

The other woman raised her hand to stop her from standing. “It’s quite alright.” Dez was fully in the steeple now, tucked under her arm was one of the thicker blankets that had found its way int HQ. “Deacon said you might be up here.”

Wanderer glared in the direction of where she threw the bottle, “Of course he would know that.”

There was a soft-hearted smile on Desdemona’s face as she walked towards her, draping the quilt over Wanderer who took it greedily. “Mind if I joined you?” Dez didn’t wait for an answer as she settled down next to her, shoulders touching. She was always warm; Wanderer had noticed in the times that they had stood next to each other in briefings. Like her body was trying to bring soul into the entire universe. “You left suddenly. I almost mistook the movement for Glory.”

Wanderer winced inwardly. She had hoped her exit wasn’t noticed. “I didn’t mean to make a scene, ‘m sorry.” She brought the blanket up to her chin, so that only her head was peeking out.

Dez chuckled with a wave of her hand, warm and full of life. “It wasn’t you who caused a scene Wanderer. However, Tom’s in a tizzy.”

Wanderer moved to stand but once again Dez stopped her, “Drummer and Deacon are calming him down, it’s alright. He was worried he upset you.”

She bit her lip before answering, “No, not at all I just- I needed some air.”

Dez nodded, seeming to understand. “Do you need someone to listen? It’s not good to keep everything inside, you’ll rot.”

As an agent of the Railroad, Desdemona was her superior. As the general of the Minutemen, she was her equal. But as people? Desdemona was her friend. A friend who she knew hardly anything about. If she were sobber would she accept the offer? “I wouldn’t know where ta start.”

Dez faced the window she’d thrown the bottle out of. “You can just speak. Anything that comes to mind.”

What a dangerous thing doing that could be. “I’m angry Dez.” She settled for keeping it simple.

The older – or younger depending on how one looked at it – woman nodded, “I had to sat with my anger for a long time until it told me its real name was grief. You haven’t been gifted a moment to do so.”

The snow was lighting now, soft flurries falling peacefully outside the spire. It looked beautiful, in an eerie way. Dez was right. There hadn’t been a second where she slowed down to absorb everything that has happened to her. It was nearly a year since she came out of the vault and she hadn’t even begun to process any of it. It was always go go go. Always who can she help, what can she fix? She hadn’t added herself to that list.

Wanderer sighed into the blanket; breath still visible but not as ridged as before. “I guess I'm more than angry… I'm scared. I- I'm scared that'll forget everyone I knew. I'm scared that I won't remember my husband’s laugh, the taste of my sister in law’s apple pie, the color of the ocean that isn't irradiated. I'm terrified that I'll forget everyone that I knew but more than that,” a tear fell down her cheek, Desdemona paid it no mind, “I- what if I'm not me? What if what if Toms right and I am a synth- Not that that wouldn't make me any less a person but… but would I still be me? Or am I just pretending to be a dead woman? What if these memories aren't mine but what if I have no right to mourn these people?”

Dez laced her fingers in her lap I thought full expression on her face as she laid out the words she would say in her mind. “Our memories are what make us people, what defines our character. If you were a synth, you’d still be you because you have the memories of _you_.”

Wanderer wasn't expecting Desdemona to say something like that, with how fervent she was about their work in the Memory Den. But she kept that thought to herself. The alcohol in her system, however kept it buzzing in the back of her mind.

“Can I share something with you?” Dez didn’t wait for a response as she often didn’t, “The woman I called my grandmother would knock on every doorframe she walked through twice just like I do. She taught me how to cook tato and molerat stew so it actually tasted good. She taught me how to read and write, and my S’s and G’s look like hers. That woman wrote about grief so frankly that I could make sense of it when I was a child. I often wonder how much of me was a part of her. How much of me is my aunt, or the woman I loved? How much is my little brother?” She looked to the sky now, searching for something she couldn’t quite see. Wanderer got the impression that all these people were dead now.

“A few years back,” Dez continued, “Deacon had made a habit of bringing every book he could find to Switchboard. One was by a man named Douglas Hofstadter-”

Wanderer perked up, the moment making her dizzy, “He’s the director for the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. One of the foremost American researchers of the science of cognition…or he was.” There was a special kind of excitement she reserved just for the pre-war facts she could recall. It made her feel like a child knowing the answer to a question asked by a teacher, desperate for praise.

Dez nodded, humoring the drunk woman. It was the kind of motion one makes when a toddler is explaining the rules of a game they’ve just made up. “The book of his I read was called something like I Am a Strange Loop. The main goal of the book was establishing how, exactly, does consciousness- individuality, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, a sense of personhood- arise from lifeless and unthinking fragments that make a person? After all atoms themselves, don’t have personalities. But yet people, who are only atoms all are told- somehow, what to do.”

She folded her arms with a shiver. Without thinking, Wanderer lifted the blanket from herself and draped the majority of it over Desdemona with a smile. Oh, she did drink too much.

“Thank you, Wands.” Dez settled into the blanket next to her, “The crux of his argument was that humans are self-referential feedback loops. We take in knowledge from the world and incorporate it into how we react the next time we receive similar information. A whole section of the book is dedicated to Hofstadter’s concern with the memory of his late wife, Carol. She died suddenly and he was left pondering what parts of her- if any, could ‘survive’ in his memory. He eventually decided that every human is a combination and response to all the other humans they’ve ever interacted with.”

The look on Wanderer’s face must have cued Dez to realize she wasn’t connecting her train of though in her current state, so Desdemona clarified. The soft smile sill on her face. “As long as you remember someone- a dead friend, a relative, a pet- and your experiences with them they’re not really gone. The way their personalities impacted you, affects the way _you_ act and interact with others. Being a person is a self-replicating concept. Your acts ripple out in ways that can never be completely witnessed or realized. In a substantial, cosmic sort of way, no one ever really dies- they live on in their friends.” Dez returned her attention to the snow around them. It was so very quiet outside the safety of the church tower. The ice seemed to freeze the world beyond it. Wanderer blinked and, in that movement, she realized how tired she’d gotten.

Her hand found its way to the star shaped pendant that hung around her neck on a silver chain. Wanderer chewed on her lip before speaking, “It’s kinda funny how we’re all lil’ hodgepodges, huh? Just weird little stars that grow brighter by snagging other people’s habits and thoughts and tics n’ jokes and phrases. Old songs to hum and hopes to dream.” A yawn slipped out of her, “Fears act as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What’s at the start an unnatural- alien mannerism to us, slowly starts to fuse into the stuff that makes us. Kinda like wax melting in the sun, slowly but surely becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else.” Wanderer let out a soft, drunken giggle and set her head on Dez’s shoulder, “Though that person might very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with.”

She felt Dez move her head to look at her before shifting it back to the skyline, the woman making no moment to shift her away.

“Dez?” Wanderer mumbled out.

The other woman hummed in reply.

“Thank you for this… ‘m sorry if I fall asleep on ya’.”

Desdemona’s shoulders moved up and down gently, stifling a laugh. “It’s quite alright.”


End file.
